“Friends of Hamas” and Andrew Breitbart’s Legacy

The philosopher Karl Popper once said, “Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it.” He was talking about science and philosophy, but he could have been talking about journalism, too. At its best, reporting is like science: you form a hypothesis, and you try to prove it. But as importantly—more importantly—you shoot it full of holes to see if any of the wounds are fatal. This, unfortunately, is a lesson that a certain part of the conservative media doesn’t seem to have learned yet.

The most recent example of this issue, of course, is the suddenly infamous “Friends of Hamas” story. About two weeks ago, Breitbart News editor-at-large Ben Shapiro reported:

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.”

There was, it turns out, a problem with the story: Friends of Hamas does not exist, and never has. Slate’s Dave Weigel did the work to prove this last week, and on Wednesday, the New York Daily News’ Dan Friedman followed up, disclosing that he was, by way of a jokey hypothetical apparently filtered through Capitol Hill’s version of the telephone game, the source for the idea that Friends of Hamas existed and that it might in some way be connected to Chuck Hagel.

It may have taken a couple weeks and the work of a couple good reporters for Friends of Hamas’s non-existence and Shapiro’s grievous mistake to be definitively proven, but the flaw in Shapiro’s post was evident as soon as it was published, and should have been clear to him even before that. The day that Shapiro’s story first came out, I searched both Google and Lexis-Nexis to find information about Friends of Hamas; the only records of its existence I was able to find were Shapiro’s post and links to it. That wasn’t definitive proof that the group didn’t exist, but it was a strong indicator, and anyone else who took the five or ten minutes necessary to conduct those searches would have seen the same thing. Yet Shapiro and Breitbart.com went ahead with the report anyway, and a significant number of outlets on the right, from radio shows and blogs to the National Review, picked up the news and ran with it based on nothing more.

Now, Shapiro and Breitbart.com are refusingto admit that Shapiro made a serious mistake, and attackinganyonewhosuggestsotherwise. This kind of behavior from them is unsurprising, and not just because it’s an outgrowth of the worldview and strategy of their founder, Andrew Breitbart. (For more on Breitbart, who died last year, see Rebecca Mead’s Profile of him from 2010.) To be embarrassed about the story, they’d have to understand that the hypothesis of Shapiro’s story was “Chuck Hagel may have been the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas,” and they’d have to care about proving it true. Their version of the hypothesis is much simpler, and more vicious: “Someone told us that Chuck Hagel may have been the recipient of funding from a group called Friends of Hamas.” This has the virtue, from a certain perspective, of being completely unfalsifiable—as soon as the source gave them the tip, the story was true by definition and in perpetuity, no matter what.

There is no reporter who is incapable of error, no established media outlet without a black mark or twenty on its record. But those are generally mistakes or aberrations; this is the Breitbart.com way of doing business. Where journalists are researchers, they see themselves as warriors, picking up Breitbart’s hashtagged mantle #WAR. With that mindset, the kind of rigor they demand from the mainstream media becomes a hindrance.

It’s not often that one sees the kind of blatant disregard for the truth involved in the Friends of Hamas story. Still, even as the right has made more of an effort to establish its own journalistic endeavors, conservative media outlets, in practice, are still failing all too often to properly vet their stories. Never has this been more evident than during the Hagel confirmation fight. Obviously, there’s something to be said for tenaciousness, especially when it comes to checking into someone who is slated to become one of the most important people in the American government. But there’s a difference between dogged reporting and reporting that pretends even the most meager evidence—loose paraphrases, faded memories, suggestions—is definitive proof. Nor has this been limited to Hagel.

Late last year, the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper (who has been one of Hagel’s most insistentpursuers lately) wrote a blog post about questions that NBC anchor David Gregory had posed to the N.R.A.’s Wayne LaPierre’s about the latter’s proposal to put armed guards in schools. Halper reported:

But when it comes to Gregory’s own kids, however, they are secured every school day by armed guards.

The Gregory children go to school with the children of President Barack Obama, according to the Washington Post. That school is the co-ed Quaker school Sidwell Friends.

According to a scan of the school’s online faculty-staff directory, Sidwell has a security department made up of at least 11 people. Many of those are police officers, who are presumably armed.

Moreover, with the Obama kids in attendance, there is a secret service presence at the institution, as well.

It’s true, of course, that there is a Secret Service detail protecting the Obama children, even when they’re at school. But the bits about Gregory’s kids being “secured every school day by armed guards,” and about Sidwell’s security department and members of it being armed? Well, that’s just not true, as the Post’s Glenn Kessler documented. Moreover, Halper had every reason to be wary, and to do some careful reporting before publishing his story—Sidwell is, as he noted, a Quaker school, and Quakers are well known for pacifism. (Richard Nixon excepted.) Again, as in Shapiro’s case, that fact alone isn’t proof that Sidwell security wouldn’t carry guns, but it should have been obvious to Halper that it was at least a potentially serious flaw in his hypothesis. He went ahead with his story anyway; as of now, it remains, despite Kessler’s report, without any sort of update or correction. (Halper didn’t respond to an e-mail requesting comment.)

At some point, if they want to be taken more seriously, members of the conservative media will have to take their own declarations about the commitment to journalism more seriously. More importantly, they’ll have to realize that reporting isn’t just the means to a desired political end; done right, it’s the end in itself, no matter what it digs up.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.

Alex Koppelman was a politics editor for newyorker.com from from 2011 to 2013.